County Fair Part 2

The next two members' entries we would like to highlight are from Mardi and Marcy.

Mardi entered a baby blanket, napkins, table runner, a shawl, two towels and a caplet knit using hand-spun yarn.

Mardi Baby blanket

Mardi Caplet knitted with hand-spun

Mardi Napkins

Mardi Table runner

Mardi Shawl

Mardi Towel

Mardi Towel

Marcy also entered two items: a scarf and a towel.

Marcy Scarf

Marcy's towel

There will be more members entries later. 

If it's August, it Must be Time for the County Fair

The second week in August is a busy time here in Nevada County.  The local fiber guild is responsible for setting up and managing the woven, spun, felted and handspun made entries.  Members of Not 2 Square did their part and entered their fiber exhibits.  Wendy-Marie entered two scarves and a shawl.  

The top scarf was woven and then enhanced with fabric paint and a stencil to create the leaf pattern.

Wendy-Marie's shawl was designed using a musical score and assigning colors and widths of stripes based on the music.

Sue V entered a number of items.  There were two sets of napkins (top pictures) and two towels (bottom pictures).

Her Nevada County Inspiration piece was designed with local river salmon in mind.

Sue also wove a scarf using the "snake skin" pattern featured in Handwoven magazine.  

This is just the beginning of the entries.  More to come in later posts.

More Results

Diana is the next weaver to be highlighted. She has enough entries for her own post.  

Detail

Collaboration lap robe

Diana and a quilting friend, Lani, collaborated on a lovely quilted lap robe that was made up of woven squares sewn together with commercial fabric.  Diana wove nine different squares, inspired by an article in the January/February 2004 issue of Handwoven magazine.  These squares are all woven in Spot Bronson.  She used 10/2 cotton sett at 24 epi for the warp.  She used 3/2, 5/2 cotton and sewing thread for the weft.  This lap robe was created for the Holiday Cheer project for this coming December.  

Read more details at the blog post from last year:

http://not2squareweavers.blogspot.com/2014/10/september-meeting-part-i.html

Nevada County Inspired Scarf

Color Inspiration

Diana entered a scarf in the Nevada County Inspiration Division.  The yarn was from the scarf challenge and were contributed by Dee.  (See blog post:  http://not2squareweavers.blogspot.com/2015_04_01_archive.html )  The warp yarns were 8/2 green rayon, 4 ply variegated rayon, 5/2 light green cotton and ribbon also in greens.  The warp was sett as follows:  8/2 rayon – 18 epi; 4 ply rayon – 12 epi; 5/2 cotton & ribbon – 12 epi.  The warp was threaded in a straight draw on 4 shafts.

The weft yarns were the 8/2 green rayon alternating with a 10/2 pale green cotton for the majority of the scarf, woven in plain weave.  Diana used orange, white, fuchsia, blue and purple similar weight yarns for the accent areas of the weft. The accent weft patterns were mostly twills found in Anne Dixon’s book:  The Handweaver's Pattern Directory.

Diana wove a cotton table runner using an Echo pattern on 8-shafts.  

Table Runner

Detail

There were two additional scarves.  One using chenille as weft and the second woven with rayon.  

Scarf with Chenille

Rayon scarf

Napkin

She entered a napkin woven with cotton with a nice decorative design.

There were also three towels - both tea towels and bath hand towels.

Tea Towel in Overshot

Detail

Cotton Bath Hand Towel

Detail of Hemstitching

Cotton Tea Towel Detail

Cotton Tea Towel

Congratulations to Diana for all of her well deserved awards this year!

Not 2 Square Weavers at the County Fair

If it's August in Nevada County, it must be time for the County Fair. Several of our members entered woven items in this year's "Wool, Fibers & Textiles". Over the next several posts we'll share the entries.

 

Betsy wove a rug using from remnants of gloves in bright colors from the Solmate Sock Company. It is 80% cotton and 20% nylon. 

 

 

She also wove a table runner in blue and black tencel.  It’s an undulating twill with an unusual treadling pattern.  The pillow cover is woven using an 8-shaft shadow weave pattern with variegated rayon weft and tencel warp twill. 



Table runner




Pillow

 

Diana entered a placemat and coordinating napkins. Both the placemat and napkins were weft faced using cotton yarns.

placemat

napkins

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She entered two scarves that were woven from hand dyed yarn.  The first used a painted warp and included a ribbon in the warp for a little extra pizzazz.  



scarf 1

 

scarf 2

The second scarf used a dyed cotton warp that didn't come out quite as Diane expected but the resulting scarf was very nice.  The fancy fringe complements the plain-weave structure.

 

 

Diana also received a First Prize for a hand towel woven in an extended manifold twill from a William Bateman manuscript.
                                             

 

Towel

Pictoral Tutorial - Weaving placemats and napkins on the same warp

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that Sue Habegger used to sell placemats and matching napkins using a technique in which the placemats are on a dense warp of 30epi and the napkins are woven on the same warp at 15epi by using half the warp threads for the upper layer and half for the lower layer. 

 

Here is the process in pictures and the weaving draft is here. (4th draft from top)

Cones of cotton yarn for warp

Warp being wound on warping reel

Warp set up on loom - sleying the reed

Keeping the warp under control

Heddle threading half way done



Warp beam down for access to heddles

 

 

 

Warp wound on the warp beam

 

Tying warp to front beam

Placemat weaving begins.  Sue uses mop cotton for the weft and a plain weave tie up.

Layers separated for napkins (note one shuttle for each layer)

 

Close up of the two layers for napkins

Finished napkins and matching placemats.